Silk
by Sage Pagan
Summary: Some call it a poetic existence. Others pathetic.
1. Hatchling

**It seems that random inspiration has struck yet again. I told myself I wouldn't start another multi-chapter fic until I'd finished a few others...but, I lied. Hope you guys like this one. ~_ Sage_**

* * *

**Prologue**

A silkworm moth has no mouth.

Its delicate body is round, soft and milky white, as are its ironic wings, which are too weak to support its heavy body. Unable to fly, the moth is doomed to crawl and drag itself along, winged but earthbound for the remainder of its brief adulthood.

Defenseless, flightless and famished, the moth has but a few days to find a mate and breed before it starves to death. Whether the moths produce offspring or not doesn't change their fate; either way they will die within a week, gone in an eye blink like a shooting star, like fleeting peacock tails of light chasing and vanishing on its plunge into darkness.

The moths' young, once hatched, are small and frail and just as powdery white. Long ago the silkworms thrived in the wild. But after centuries of domestication by humans for their silk, the worms can no longer survive without assistance. If they are not directly placed on their food source, the worms will wander aimlessly and die of starvation, or be plucked from the trees by predators.

It takes five tries to become an adult. Five evolutions to get it right, five struggles to shed old flesh and grow anew—a different mask, a stronger armor—but the successful are few. After five rounds of molting, the worms spin themselves a silken cocoon before finally emerging into adulthood—defenseless, flightless and famished.

Some call it a poetic existence. Others pathetic.

"What a lame life," the child huffs, shaking his head after his mother tells him of the silkworms. "They can't even eat when they grow up. They just have babies and die."

Then, when they come upon it, his mother holds up an old _hanbok _at the markets they frequented. The traditional robe for males, now considered an antique donned only for special occasions, is sewn with the richest of silks. Nowadays everything is synthetic, merely facades of former glories. But if she searches carefully, she believes that beautiful, genuine silk woven in the old ways can be found.

She places his small hands onto golden threads shimmering like sunrays, onto deep blood vermilions gaping like an open wound. He curls and caresses plump fingers over fabrics as soft and milky as those moths, into strands that wove and danced into swirls of cloud and dragon scales, into myriad shapes of violet and azure-turquoise blossoms.

"Look at this robe," she says. "It took thousands of silkworms to make it. How could a 'lame' creature create something so lovely? Their lives have a purpose."

"People abused the worms to make this thing, _Ummah_," the boy retorts, his hands dropping from the silk. "_Hanbok_ does not have to be their purpose."

"That's not what I mean," his mother said.

"Then what do you mean?"

_I can't tell you yet. You are too young anyhow._

"I'm going to make you _hanbok_ some day," she replies. "Every good Korean boy needs one."

_I can only give you wings. _

"Mom," the boy grumbles with a scowl. "They're itchy and heavy. Can't I just get a new _dobok_? _Sah boo nim_ said I need one."

"One day you'll appreciate it, Hwoarang," she sighs, fingering the robe one last time before moving on to the next vendor. "Hopefully for all the right reasons."

_Don't crawl and drag yourself along like me. Find a way to fly.

* * *

_

**1 – Hatchling

* * *

**

**-Seoul-**

She rarely slept.

Like an adoring but forgetful mother, Seoul cradled millions of souls, nurturing and feeding and destroying them from a sky-scraped, neon-eyed womb.

Her many tongues—subways and trains and congested highways—led into a mouth salivating from music and laughter, pulsing with pink and yellow lights that bewildered the mind and dazzled the eyes. Her food gnawed at your gut as desire would upon seeing someone beautiful—tender_ galbi_ and fiercely seasoned _pulkogi_, freshly steamed rice and kimchi. Sated you could never be for Seoul could only offer you more—neither with nor without.

Inhale the smells of the sky and road and become dizzy on gasoline and stir fried oil, on a whore's perfume and her pasty pink lipstick. Lean in and decipher the faint aromas of peonies long dead, dumped in the garbage alongside wilted roses and wreaths of evergreen. A child's breath sweetened by coconut candy, black trees humbled by the rain and the humidity, the fading wafts of a boy's cheap cologne as he pursued a pretty girl off the street. The gardens, sown in the traditional way, stared quietly back at passersby, offering stone arched bridges and pale-blossomed trees for contemplation and inspiration.

But beyond her smiles and fluorescent eyes were the dark corners of Seoul's mind. Pink and gold lights faded to black as the alleyways and red-light districts came alive. The gang bangers hustled and bled for cash, sex and drugs, smashing cigarette butts into concrete and stone. Girls so beautiful it made your heart ache peered at you from curtained rooms, their painted eagle eyes and glistening mouths promising a good time in exchange for a few _won_. Someone's lost children slept and fought and made love in the ashes and charcoal, telling war stories and getting high in dimly lit doorways, greeting visitors with a lazy haze of smoke.

He stared into his Seoul and fell in love.

She was his only mother now.

Six years ago, when he was nine, cancer claimed his real mother, his _hanbok_-obsessed, raven-haired mother. His father had abandoned him when he was seven, so he didn't find it worth pining for someone who had never wanted him in the first place. Eight years later and he could still feel the bastard's fingerprints on him. Hwoarang had been his father's favorite punching bag after all, particularly after drunken trysts with another man's wife.

Hwoarang missed his mother though, even if they'd had their fair amount of quarreling and disagreements. He missed her daily lectures, as irritating as they could be, and the morning green tea that she'd forced down his throat until he'd learned to like the taste. God, he even missed her smell. Could he even remember how she smelled?

Unlike with his father, _Ummah _wasn't someone he could deny and disguise with this gang, with this supposedly masculine display of strength and power. Hell, they were posturing like a troop of male baboons over a blade of grass. He knew that. But he needed them as much as they needed him—at least, he hoped so.

"Oi."

The boy turned to his friend Sung, a brutally built but skittish seventeen-year-old. He'd been the first to accept Hwoarang as the new gang leader. As of now, he was the only member Hwoarang trusted.

"_Mwo_?"

"Stop thinking, man," Sung half jested, lighting a cigarette. "It makes everyone nervous. You get too fuckin' _quiet_."

Hwoarang smirked and declined the cigarette his friend offered.

"Just remembering some shit, that's all. Nothing important enough to make you fools nervous," the gang leader replied, eyes clouding over once more.

Sung let it go, knowing not to pry too much into his leader's heavily guarded personal life.

The gang always became fidgety whenever their leader fell into silence, but they dealt with it—or, at least, learned to deal with it. It wasn't good to get on Hwoarang's bad side; as young as he was, Hwoarang was as violent as they came. Though half of the members were at least two years his senior, they understood—and experienced—Hwoarang's prowess with the streets. It wasn't solely due to his elegant and fierce deliverance of Tae Kwon Do either; the boy was a rabid wolf, lost and crazy and ready to kill to save its desperate, hungry ass. He was a hunting hawk plummeting headfirst toward solid earth for another taste of blood.

Blood Talon, they called him sometimes. After ousting Kwan from his former leadership position—and nearly killing the twenty-year-old in the process—Hwoarang's comrades quickly learned their place.

But it was true that he wasn't his usual sharp-tongued, hotheaded self tonight. Perhaps it was because today was the anniversary of his mother's death.

"So who's next?" Sung inquired, obliterating his cigarette beneath a leather boot before lighting another. "Those pussies up in Jung-gu? Or is it Mapo-gu again?"

"Jung-gu," Hwoarang replied, momentarily forgetting his mother as a smile tore at his mouth. "Those sons of bitches tried to kill Baek. Dunno what the hell for. But the bastards will pay."

"They're tryin' to get to you, dumbass," Sung smirked. "Everyone knows how much that old fart means to you, so killing him would be gold."

"_Shibal-nom_," Hwoarang snarled, but the boy knew his friend was right.

To say that Hwoarang fought well was a massive understatement; he consistently defeated-dominated-every rival gang, as well as the members of his own. But he had yet to understand the politics of gang life. He was violent yes, but not yet calculating, neither manipulative nor strategic. He was only fifteen after all, a child who'd been raised on principles of peace and discipline, as both mother and sah boo nim had emphasized. But Hwoarang had always been attracted to trouble. That adrenaline and heart-rate shattering thrill of escaping death's clutches time and again, of successfully hustling more _won _than he could fit in his pockets was the most exhilarating high there could be.

But he knew that pure violence wasn't enough. If he didn't learn and adapt quickly the gang would find a way to demote him—or kill him.

The leader smiled, however, unafraid; he enjoyed the challenge. Butterflies of adrenaline were already swarming dangerously in his gut, up and down skin and vein and bone.

They were always fearless and rebellious at the worst of times. All teenage boys thought they were immortal after all, gods among pawns and princes. All it took was one moment to change everything, but Hwoarang didn't care about that. He was top dog after all, king of Seoul, alpha wolf and Tae Kwon Do prodigy. He planned on living forever, if not until he was hundreds of years old, then at least in conversation and in memory. He'd the best street leader South Korea would ever know! He'd be unfor-fucking-gettable.

"They're comin' tonight," Hwoarang said, running long fingers through hair as dark as his mother's. His legs were already itching to pulverize flesh and bone.

"How do you know?" Sung asked.

"Trust me. After a beating from Baek—"

"You'd know about those, wouldn't ya."

Hwoarang shot Sung a murderous look.

"—the Jung-gu boys will be thirsting for blood. It'll take more than an amateur thug and his weenie knife to take down my teacher."

"Doo San _is _pretty fuckin' scary, just sayin."

Hwoarang smirked. "Knowing Baek, he had those morons bawling for their ancestors."

Sung laughed, seizing another cigarette. "Shit, man. Woulda loved to see that."

"Gather the others, Sung," Hwoarang ordered, finally snapping from his quiet reverie. "We'll wait for our enemies at dusk, out by Yul Hyansaek _myoji_."

"Where your mother is buried," Sung commented.

"Yeah," the gang leader muttered. "Where my mother is buried."

"But ain't that, uh, like, dissin' your mom's spirit, man? She might pull something freaky and start haunting you n' stuff," Sung said nervously, glancing at his leader for signs of retaliation.

Hwoarang laughed humorlessly. Sung was lucky that Hwoarang liked him. Had it been any way otherwise, the seventeen-year-old would have been beaten on the spot.

"My mom's _dead_, Sung," Hwoarang growled.

He always became cruel and scathing when wounded. Irrational. Insulting. Dangerous. It was all just another mask to cover up the scarring wounds and the blood that just wouldn't clot.

"Gone," he continued. "Poof! Eaten up by cancer and gone like her damn silkworms. You know silkworms, right? Little idiot things that did nothing but eat, shit, fuck and die."

"Kinda like humans."

"Shut up Il-Sung. Now do what I say and go get Kwan and the others."

* * *

**-Soul-**

The truth is that I would give anything to have my mother come back and tell me about silkworms.

I'd give my right leg to listen to her drone about them for hours. Just to have her back would be nice. Hearing her voice would be nice.

She never did get the chance to sew me _hanbok_.

But I'm fifteen, right? I'm not supposed to care.

* * *

**Glossary**

_hanbok - _traditional Korean robe for men_  
_

_ummah - _mother

_dobok _- Tae Kwon Do uniform

_sah boo nim_ - a more endearing term for "instructor" or "master" in Tae Kwon Do

_galbi_ - grilled ribs, either beef or pork

_pulkogi_ - marinated barbecue beef

_won_ - Korean currency

_mwo -_ what

_shibal-nom_ - fuck you

_myoji_ - cemetery


	2. Heart Shaped Box

**A more sensitive side to our favorite redhead, because it only becomes harsher later on. Enjoy. ~ _Sage_**

* * *

**2 – Heart Shaped Box

* * *

**

**-Soul-**

I tried to smile for her, gripping her frail, skeletal hand as gently as I could.

"Don't worry, Sun Jung. I will look after him. You know I love him as if he were my son."

"I know, Master Doo San."

"Baek, please."

"Baek. I do not doubt he will be safe with you. You've been more of a father to him than the one who left us two years ago."

I visited her almost every day since she'd been diagnosed with breast cancer, sometimes with a bouquet of _mugunghwa,_ her favorite, or a book I knew she'd wanted to read. Since her diagnosis, I'd looked after her son, sheltering him under my roof when his own home became too foreign and cold without the presence of his mother.

Maybe I didn't have to take in the boy; a distant aunt or uncle would have sufficed. But most of them lived all the way in Pusan, some even in Japan, and how could Hwoarang visit his mother then? Sun Jung could have hired a nanny. But they're not always trustworthy. I heard they steal things or abuse the children they're supposed to look after. And so, without question, I took Hwoarang in. No reason was good enough for me to give him up, unless it was his mother's recovery.

_Such a good man, Mr. Doo San is, taking care of other people's children like that._

_Ne, ne, my daughter is a student in his dojang. Admires him so much!_

I liked to think that pure, unbiased compassion and selflessness were the reasons why I took in the boy. It couldn't be because I loved his mother. She was still mourning her husband's abandonment after all. Wounds were too fresh. She had a son to focus on. Being a working, single mother had taken its toll, so I later allowed Hwoarang to learn Tae Kwon Do for free. I never could have told her about how I felt.

Koreans were supposed to be good at keeping a straight face anyway. I should know better.

His mother, once vibrant and beautiful, laid like a cadaver on the hospital bed; her formerly raven locks—the envy of every woman she knew—was replaced with a glossy baldness, blue veins slithering like rivers and vines beneath translucent skin. For a year she fought the cancer, smiling every day even as the chemotherapy destroyed her strength and devoured her flesh and hair. But today she was different. Today I knew she'd allowed the cancer to eat up her mind and soul as well as her body.

"Maybe I should have named him Hyun Su—long life."

"What do you mean?"

The boy was only nine. How could she think about such things in this situation?

"I know my son," she murmured, face crumpling as her bottom lip quivered from imminent tears. "Something that beautiful is not meant for a long life."

"Look, I'll call the nurse. I think you need rest."

"But just look at him, Baek. I have no hope left, and I had no time to give him any. He's still so young."

"Hwoarang is a strong boy, and you will watch him live to be a hundred," I said, hoping to cheer her.

"I was never strong, was I? I gave him this bad, bad life, without a father, and soon without a mother—"

"Sun, you shouldn't be talking like this. This isn't your fault. You _must_ be strong for Hwoarang, now more than ever. The boy needs you," I pleaded.

_I_ need you…

"We either go out burning bright, beautiful and lustrous—or we whither and wilt like me, waiting for shadows to pluck us from our dreams," she continued with bitter melancholia.

"Sun, please."

But I knew I'd already lost.

The tears spilled from her tired eyes now, deepening the shadows of her cheekbones, like a trail of footprints in the snow. I could already smell death in the room. She had but to succumb to its pull, crooning and beckoning with its seductive siren's song.

"Everything is his," she sighed. "And he is my everything."

"Sun. Sun? Oh Sun…"

**-Seoul-**

He patted his jeans pocket, unable to suppress a victorious smirk as he signaled his friends with a nod of his head. They were ditching homeroom again, instead choosing to huddle behind the school's graffiti-riddled brick walls—courtesy of Hwoarang and his posse—as rainclouds thickened in the sky, growling like an empty stomach. Monsoon season would soon tear the sky open and unleash gloriously cold rain for months on end, perfect weather for wreaking mayhem.

"What did you do to your _hair_, man?"

"Oh _hell _no, he actually went through with it!"

"Shut the fuck up, all of you. That's not why we're here," the sixteen-year-old snapped, running long fingers through his freshly dyed, fiery hair.

It had been a dare at first, but Hwoarang discovered that he liked the new 'do, an affinity that would soon border along obsessive as he struggled to maintain its vibrancy with cheap boxes of dye or long waits at the salon—without his friends' awareness, of course.

Like his mother's swarthy mane, Hwoarang's hair would become an object of envy.

"Hurry up they'll be looking for us soon," Byung interjected, bouncing nervously on the balls of his feet.

From his pockets Hwoarang pulled two bags of marijuana and tiny rolls of white paper. Thrusting his hand into the bag, he pulled out his share and began to roll the joint, fingers working deftly as his comrades snatched at their portions. Sung passed around a lighter, allowing the redhead the first flame.

Ten minutes later, Hwoarang and his three companions were sitting in limp nirvana around one another, heads bowed and muscles lax as they retold stories that never happened and laughed at the dark skies above them. They were already young, stupid and fearless, but the weed always added an extra kick.

"This junk issssss _po_tent," Sung sighed over and over, his tongue stumbling over the words. "_Po_tent stuff right here. Damn _po_tent."

Hwoarang chuckled, rolling another joint before falling victim to a heap of coughing.

"I figured you were the one responsible for these shenanigans, Doo San."

Mr. Kim, one of the school's many hall monitors—or "dickless jackasses who needed to boss kids around to feel powerful," as Hwoarang viewed them—stood with a clipboard in his hand, peering down at the top of the boy's hair with piggish eyes.

Three of the teens leaped to their feet as if they'd been set on fire, but a bit unsteadily at that. Only Hwoarang continued to sit quietly against the brick wall, taking long, slow drags from that little white cocoon, as if drawing life from it, the stinky sweet aroma wafting up into his face and hair like a toxic halo. He could feel the thunder as if it were his heartbeat; lazy raindrops cast wet freckles onto his hands and face.

"Let's just say that suspension is me being generous," Mr. Kim announced later, once he'd managed to force the foursome into his office. "If it weren't for my admiration for Mr. Baek Doo San, your sorry asses would be expelled."

"Are you finished?" Hwoarang asked with his arms crossed over his chest. The effects of the weed hadn't yet dissipated, but it wasn't the drug that was talking. Hwoarang truly didn't give a shit.

"As long as you're here, Hwoarang, we'll never be finished. I better not see you for three days."

* * *

Hwoarang was good at a lot of things.

Respecting authority wasn't one of them. Expressing emotions wasn't one of them. School definitely wasn't one of them.

But unleash him into the fighting ring with only his legs and his wits to keep him breathing and he became a different creature within seconds. The ones who would take him as a thickheaded brute were stunned as he molted his loudmouthed street persona for that of a calculating, merciless fighter. Fierce and feral, yet able to maintain a breathtaking grace and fluidity, Hwoarang, at the unripe age of sixteen, came—and conquered. Tournament judges and rival gangs alike were unable to look away as they admired from the sidelines, often awed into silence by the beautiful violence before them. No longer was the naïve fifteen-year-old thug leader; the rabid wolf had become a skilled hunter, weaving in and out with a flick of his feet or sudden shift in stance, calm yet ablaze like the red burning in his hair, delivering lightning quick blows to foes too dumbfounded to react. One moment silent, the next filled with screaming _kihap_, a deafening war cry to any opponent foolish enough to believe he could defeat this tsunami of talented rage.

And then there was the guitar.

Give him a guitar and Hwoarang created other worlds.

His first six-string had been a gift from Baek for his fourteenth birthday. His mentor figured the boy loved rock music so much that he might as well give him the real thing. All kids wanted to be rock stars anyway, right? It could be fun for him.

What Baek didn't realize was that rock music, metal, alternative, punk, black, grunge or otherwise, pulled at something deep in Hwoarang. The guitar provided an outlet that neither gang nor Tae Kwon Do lesson could offer, subduing foul tempers and disquieted soul alike. It was the one thing that understood him completely and without judgment, an instrument formed of his blood and sweat that sang back to him the songs of his soul. That guitar, that heavy black and red apparatus that tugged at heartstrings and soul strings as easily as Hwoarang plucked its steel strings, humbled the teenager; he would not let it become his arrogance. Whenever he played it a stillness shrouded him, weaving a silken serenity about him in a way he hadn't felt since the death of his mother. The world slowed and sped at the same time. The lights and sounds of Seoul dimmed to soft gray or blinded a hibiscus scarlet, diminished to whispering tranquillo or crescendoed to anguished appassionato. Whichever his mood dictated. Whichever his heart revealed.

So when he became too good, when local music stations offered him little jobs, when hot shot record companies offered him auditions and contracts, Hwoarang became angry. He hid that guitar for weeks, afraid that others would only want to exploit him because of it. Here was this magic at his fingertips, this world of pure, raw emotion, this other place that he could escape to when life deafened him with brutal reality—and people wanted to steal it from him?

He eventually compromised with himself by playing outside at night. Baek's apartment was on the highest floor, Twenty-two, so he never had to exhaust himself carrying guitar and amplifier up multiple flights of stairs. Not that he would have minded.

So there he would be, up on the rooftop with only the stars and the darkness as audience, his guitar wailing anthems long into the night, as if to summon some lost innocence floating in that infinite blackness. Searching, searching for something. He recalled memories in his music, lost moments in time that could only be fully expressed through the soft, ferocious manipulation of five fingers on six strings.

Naturally, nearby neighbors in his part of Seoul wouldn't be able to sleep. Sometimes it was due to the violence in his song, to the magnificently vengeful guitar riffs amplified to shatter eardrums, murdering any hopes of slumber while guaranteeing a moody morning and kitchens permeating with the smell of brewing coffee.

But sometimes it was because of the gentle, soothing lullabies he wove, smoothing like a mother's caress over a child's brow after a nightmare, comforting like a favorite blanket or pleasant dream. Sometimes the neighbors simply didn't want to stop listening.

When the gang wanted him late these times of nights, Hwoarang would sneak out of the apartment and join them in the gloomy roads below, scouring the streets for trouble and adventure along bruised sidewalks and beneath street lamp sentinels.

But when he played that guitar the gang knew not to bother him.

That's how Hwoarang was. Merciless in combat, volatile in speech; but it was only with the guitar that he could be both fierce and gentle, when he let the hurt arise and allowed himself to remember why he was the way he was.

These were the only times when he was utterly content with being alone.

"_Heard you last night, Hwoa. Where'd you learn that from?"_

"_Jeez, Kurt Cobain, that was some depressing shit."_

"_Haunting, dude."_

"I don't know what you guys are talking about."

The gang learned to keep their mouths shut.

As much as their leader talked and bragged, he never said anything of substance about himself.

If they wanted to know him, they had but to listen carefully at night for that guitar, playing itself to sleep.

But the gang, afflicted with loyalty and respect for their leader, listened with deaf ears.

**-Soul-**

When you died, Baek told me you said I could have everything in the house.

You know what I took? I took that picture of you and I at that frozen yogurt place when I was six, when I tasted _mochi_ for the first time. We looked really happy in that picture, even though my father's the one behind the camera.

I also found a monstrous pile of silks you've been collecting over the years. Why didn't you ever tell me about those? Were they for me? For _hanbok_?

I could have sold those silks, but I kept them for some reason. I should have just thrown them away like everything else, or sold them to some old seamstress to make for somebody else's son.

But I could tell these silks were the best of the best. I knew you'd picked them out yourself.

Otherwise, Baek and I sold everything else, including the house. I hope you don't mind.

As for school…well, I have an A in music class. You don't have to worry about the others.

You know Mom, one of these days I've gotta stop talking to you like this. The gang might think I'm insane if they find out I'm talking to a dead person. I mean, fuck, I'm supposed to be all grown up and independent, right? All healed up. Sorry, I know you hate swearing.

It's already been seven years. But the problem is that you were good to me, Mom, and now you'll always be with me. Why is it like that?

You can't even hear me can you.

Well, I hope you can somehow, 'cause I've got a new song I want to play for you tonight. Don't worry it's a nice quiet one. Good for the soul.

**-Seoul-**

"Hwoarang. Hwoarang, wake up."

Baek shook the teenager with a gentle hand on his shoulder, the sunlight illuminating his hair into a ball of fire. He wasn't at all surprised to find the boy here, but admitted that he'd been seized with minor panic when he discovered an empty bed and a missing guitar. Hwoarang had pulled disappearing acts like this before. This time, however, Baek hadn't been able to track him down at his usual haunts: the arcade; the black market; the polluted dam where he and his friends smoked pot—yes, Baek knew, and he figured he should get on with that lecture; and the Jae Bum strip mall, where all the "hotter girls" liked to shop.

Baek shook him again. The boy protested, hugging his guitar closer to his chest, but his mentor was persistent. Finally, he stirred, rising reluctantly onto an elbow with a sheepish yawn.

He'd been found out.

He'd fallen asleep at his mother's grave, drifted off into slumber somewhere between a song and the first golden rays of dawn. Hwoarang saved the best serenades for his mother, and he always played them softly, gently for her ears, because she'd liked it that way once upon a time, and because he didn't want any other ghost or living neighbor to hear this personal music.

Well, now he knew to be more careful about his nightly escapades. He'd hold off on the songwriting for a while, lest he be tempted to share them with his mother. Since someone knew about this secret, there was no use in trying to sneak out anymore. Though Hwoarang knew that Baek wouldn't say anything of the matter, he felt as if his mentor's knowledge—his intrusion—had destroyed the privacy.

The teenager found that he'd become more and more defensive as he aged, perhaps because he understood the world a bit better, understood what it meant to have no one but yourself to trust. Baek was good and kind, but the boy still felt he should keep some things to himself. Hwoarang was filled with secrets, some that even that guitar could not draw out.

The good thing about Baek Doo San was that he never made it awkward. He understood his protégé—but, even more so, he knew a broken heart when he saw one.

Clearing his throat, he offered a hand, which Hwoarang took without shame, dusting dirt off his face and pants in the process.

"Come. Your breakfast is already cold."

* * *

**Glossary**

_mugunghwa _- rose of Sharon, South Korea's national flower; symbolizes immortality

_ne _- yes

_kihap_ - the yelling sound made in Tae Kwon Do when sparring or striking


	3. I: Rebel

**It's not the best update, but I needed to get this out before another five months passed.** **Concrit appreciated. **~_**Sage**_

* * *

**3 – I: Rebel

* * *

**

**-Seoul-**

As one they moved.

Pummeling their rivals with as much fury and strength as they could muster, snarling and gnashing their teenage fangs, they wove amongst one another like silk threads of red and gold, bound together tight into a thick skein. Discarded from brick and mortar cocoons and bred for their fighting talents, they relied upon one another, fed off the same air and the same trees, nothing and no one without the other. Jeering, taunting, insulting their foes, they took turns striking and hurting; an axe kick there, lightning jab there, with the dose of knife swipe or two to spice up the game. For an hour they did this, until their rivals believed to be on the brink of defeat. Blood, sweat and saliva spattered flesh and concrete, smeared like grime on unwashed windowpanes, upon now tarnished faces of youth and long discarded childhoods.

But, just when their opponents' morale was ground near to nothing, like dark spots of old chewing gum on the pavement beneath their feet, the Seoul boys would deliberately lose. Each one would gradually falter, feigning an injury, limping and screaming mock agony, allowing themselves to be beaten near senseless, to their rivals' amusement.

How could these fools be the best? They scoffed. They were pathetic!

But the Seoul boys had something their enemies lacked, and that was a five-foot-eleven red-haired terror with a taste for spicy rice cakes, beautiful women, ear-splitting rock music and kicking serious ass.

As soon as the stakes were high—millions of more _won_ thrown into the ring, illusory confidence building higher and higher—the secret weapon emerged, legs and leather gloves at the ready.

After that, the games were over.

It depended on Hwoarang's mood most of the times. If he was bored and wanted to give his boys a show, he would defeat his enemies in what was for him slow motion. He'd take his time with the fight, bouncing lazily on the balls of his feet with fists at half-mast, perhaps even allowing his opponent to land a few amateurish blows—right before he kicked their pride and self-esteem to the moon and sent it plummeting back to the outskirts of the fight circle where they belonged.

But if he was antsy for the winnings or hankering for a quality _soju_ fix that only that kind of money could buy, he demolished his challengers and abandoned them with both of his pockets bulging. The whole exchange was comical; it reminded him of a bad anime, one with plenty of action-packed shallowness, exaggerated enthusiasm and lack of an engaging storyline. It even had a character with bizarre hair color.

But today he was in one of those languorous moods. It wasn't like the Jung-gu fight two years ago, where he'd punished Baek's would-be killers within a matter of minutes. The earnings hadn't been great that time around, but the gang understood that the fight had been too personal for pretense.

Hwoarang smiled at the knife his opponent waved in his face, flinging it from the thug's fingers with a fluid spinning back kick. When seven of the rival gangsters—supposedly the reigning dogs in Incheon—had been defeated, the eighth entered the ring with a smirk that rivaled Hwoarang's.

"So this is your ruse, eh? Pretend like you're down and then use this red fairy to win it back? Cowardice," he spat, and Hwoarang knew this was their leader, Hyo.

"Are you tellin' me you play_ honest_ in the streets? No wonder you bitches lack game," Hwoarang crowed, flexing his fingers before balling them back into fists.

Hyo bristled at the insult, the red heat of rage blushing his cheeks.

"How bout this," Hwoarang began, the smile widening on his face. "If you beat me, I'll give you your money back. If not—"

At this, Hwoarang glanced beyond the fight ring to a woman leaning against a wall watching the entire exchange. She was slender and fiercely beautiful, as was to the redhead's taste, with exquisitely pale, shapely legs and black hair snipped into a pixie cut. Hwoarang preferred long hair on his women, but this little number would be the exception. She stared back at him with heavy-lidded eyes and parted mouth, a cigarette balanced between dainty fingers glistening with gold rings and cherry blossom-pink nail polish. The girl smiled at Hwoarang knowingly, accepting his invitation.

"—I get a night with your girl," the redhead finished, and his rival exploded.

The Incheon leader knew he'd already lost; there was no way he could win such a bargain, but to refuse would be cowardly. Hwoarang intended to demean him in more ways than his pocketbook, and Hyo felt a fury so intense he knew he might kill the Seoul gang leader on the spot.

"Fuck you! You lay one finger on Eun-Mi and you're a dead man," he shrieked, itching for the handgun hidden in his jacket.

"It'll be more than a finger, trust me," Hwoarang retorted, licking his lips as he imagined Eun-Mi's nakedness. It'd been awhile since he'd slept with a woman. Say, two months?

But it had been the wrong thing to say.

In moments, Hwoarang found himself staring into the barrel of that handgun. Unafraid, he smirked, but remained motionless. This was a step too far for his liking. His gang was in uproar, shouting accusations of cheating and cowardice, but they refused to move to their leader's aid lest the Incheon leader decided to pull the trigger.

"Hey man, mah boy was jus' joking," Sung finally piped, stepping into the ring with his hands in the air. "He does that, y'know? Riles people up for laughs, y'know? Just let us take the money and go. Fight's done fair and square, uh?"

But Hyo wouldn't lower the gun. Rather, he pulled the safety and repositioned the weapon to Hwoarang's crotch.

"Babe, put the gun down."

Eun-mi sauntered over, sucking the remnants of poison from her cigarette before flicking it into the gutter. She molded herself against her boyfriend, stuffing her hands up his shirt before kissing him hard on the mouth.

"Let's go home, uh? You've had your fun, and I don't want cops after your ass again," she purred, nuzzling his neck. "Hm? Let's just go."

Hyo finally lowered his weapon, though his eyes never left Hwoarang's.

"And as for _you_," Eun-Mi growled in mock anger as she approached Hwoarang. She stopped only when her mouth was inches from his ear, her warm breath causing the gang leader to shiver with pleasure.

"Know when to shut your goddamn mouth," she snarled as she discreetly slid a piece of paper into his jeans pocket. "Next time I'll have him kill you."

She slapped him across the face for the final effect, and then retreated down the street with her Incheon herd.

Once Hyo was out of sight, Hwoarang laughed, congratulating his gang for their good work, jesting with them about his brush with death. With the excited faces of his friends surrounding him, Hwoarang opened the paper from Eun-Mi.

_Byuel Dong Byuel Night Club, midnight. Come alone._

He would have his fun after all.

* * *

"Oi! _Sah bum nim_! I'm home!"

The fight had taken most of the energy from him, but he'd decided to freshen up before his rendezvous with Eun-Mi. Baek rose from his perch on the couch and, judging by the look on his face, Hwoarang knew his mentor was anything but happy to see him. The boy groaned inwardly, knowing another fight was imminent.

"Where is it?" Baek demanded, mouth set into a calm line. But the man's eyes, like flints of obsidian, were anything but tranquil.

"Where's what?"

"Don't make me fight you, Boy. We both know who'll win."

Baek rarely threatened his pupil. But when he did, Hwoarang knew to take it seriously.

Gritting his teeth, the redhead revealed the two fist-thick wads of money he'd won earlier, each bound with rubber bands stretched near to snapping point. The silence that ensued was more shameful than Baek disciplining him in front of his friends at the_ dojang_.

Hwoarang was rarely caught off guard. But, in a move so fast the teenager barely saw it, Baek seized the bundles of cash and stuffed them into his sweatshirt pockets.

"Hey! Gimme—"

"That money is going towards something more worthy, Hwoarang, not towards smoking pot and bar hopping."

"That's not—"

"When are you going to get a real job, hm? When?"

"Why are you complaining? I'm helping pay the bills, aren't I?"

"That was before I figured out this was blood money. I did not teach you Tae Kwon Do to see you abuse it in such a way!"

"Stop making a big deal out of it. Goddamn it, I'm fucking good at this, so let me do it!"

"You're not good at anything but causing trouble. You have to stop this nonsense, Doo San Hwoarang."

"Moon Hwoarang. _Moon_."

For a moment Hwoarang thought he saw pain flicker in his instructor's eyes, but it vanished in an eye blink. Though he had legally taken Baek's surname when his mother died, Hwoarang never truly bought into the whole guardianship idea. He was alone and that was, in many ways, how he preferred it. He didn't want to be anyone's burden anymore.

"I lost everything nine years ago," the 18-year-old snarled. "So don't you tell me what I can and can't do. That's my father's job."

"Your father did nothing but beat the pride out of you," Baek replied, fists balling. "I'm trying my best here. I'm not the only one who lost everything when your mother died!"

"Oh. I see. So now this is about _you_?"

"_Anyio_, you little ingrate. It's about you doing something with your life!"

Instinctively, Hwoarang recoiled, the muscles in his legs tensing; he had never seen Baek so upset before. The man was always calm and diplomatic, with a cold composure that bordered along stoic. To see him now in such a state was disturbing; Hwoarang felt as a rabbit did in a corner as the striped tattoos of the tiger loomed above him.

"It's _always_ been about you. I promised your mother that."

Hwoarang looked away; though he didn't show it, he'd always understood how much his mentor loved him—and his mother, apparently. But it did not deter the anger nor inspire shame. He never was one for heart-to-hearts, even ones as furious as the one Baek was trying to provoke. Fire was to his liking, but not when it kindled the long dormant flames of his past woes.

"Fuck this," he muttered under his breath as he made for the door.

"Hwoarang," Baek growled, a sound that would have stopped any of his students in a heartbeat. "Get. Back. Here."

But the boy shrugged on his jacket and slammed the door behind him.

Rather than chase him, Baek brewed himself some black tea and flipped through the morning paper he hadn't had the chance to read. Hwoarang would be back sooner or later. To everyone who didn't know him, the little rebel was as destructive as a hurricane. But to his teacher, he was as predictable as thunder after lightning. One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…boom. One one-thousand, two one-thousand…

Sooner or later that angry thunder would crash, clashing with sky and rain and lightning for dominance of the sky. It lacked the electrifying, blinding deadliness of its lightning peer, the one who could truly deal death and danger. Thunder's only power was its own angry voice growling without threat save for, perhaps, a trembling windowpane or a startled jump. It could only complain with futile fury, snarling false peril until the sun bit at its heels and herded it away, or until rain and lightning coaxed it into peaceful obedience.

Hwoarang was merely following a pattern—his personal _pumsae_. Learn first, listen later. Light would always be faster than sound.

Baek sipped the tea, the hot liquid searing his throat and chest like the way his student was prone to doing; a singed heart due to frequent arguments, a burned throat from too much yelling. Baek had certainly withstood too much fire from him, but he figured, as Hwoarang had turned eighteen recently, it was time for the boy to truly fend for himself-not that he hadn't been doing so already. Baek had been but the backbone, after all, the provider, the roof over the head and the food into the mouth, while Hwoarang had been free to roam and brood his emotions away, only to eject them onto the streets rather than into more nobler causes. You couldn't chisel a stone into a diamond no matter how hard you tried. Guiltily, Baek knew he had to allow Hwoarang to fail miserably if he was ever to be humbled.

The man sighed, closing the newspaper—just more crime stories, wars in the Middle East and nuclear North Korean headlines.

"I'm trying, Sun Jung. I'm trying."

**-Soul-**

I had just turned seven when I tried to kill my father.

From the kitchen drawer I'd managed to retrieve a small carving knife, tiptoed to the living room, and stood over my comatose father drooling in drunken stupor on the couch. I remember he was breathing through a mouth smeared with pink lipstick and flecked with vomit. Trembling from fear and hatred, I positioned the knife inches from his throat, my hand hurting from gripping the handle so hard.

But the bruises I hid beneath my shorts and my shirt hurt more. My mother's screams of fear as my father struck her, again and again, hurt more.

I don't know how long I stood there above my father, glaring down and hating like no child should be allowed to hate—but I couldn't do it. _It's simple, Hwoarang. Kill him. End it. Make Mama happy again._ Instead, I remember beginning to sob, the knife slipping from my little hands, the thin blade pricking the skin beneath the gray stubble that lined my father's poisonous mouth.

When he woke up and discovered my plot I received the beating of my life. If _Ummah _hadn't intervened I probably would have died.

I should have killed him when I had the chance.

The good thing about_ Ummah_ being dead is that she's _dead_. She's never coming back. I have a tombstone to mourn, pictures to relieve the longing and to sate the memories tugging through sleepless hours, songs to write and a guitar to bandage the wounds.

But my father can always come back. In some ways, he never really left.

**-Seoul-**

He dreamt last night that he was falling headfirst through space, plunging past star-studded black galaxies and through exploding meteor waves, the violent butterflies in his stomach jetting screams from a parched throat. There was nothing to grasp but his own gasping breath and hollowed air, no wings to lift him, no hope or memory to relieve the horror; just uncertainty in its entirety. Just miles of silence and spinning world and a seemingly endless descent into the dark. He wasn't ready yet. He had things to do yet.

But he kept falling.

Hour-like minutes later, he awoke and could not sleep. Standing in front of the open closet with its ceiling-high shelves, he stared at all those piles of neatly folded silks, wondering how his mother had decided which ones to choose. Quality? Color? Price? The way they might look against your son's skin, the way they draped across his shoulders so that it looked nice?

"They're pretty."

Swiveling around with fists raised, he turned to face the voice that had been watching him, his blood boiling. When he saw it was just the girl—some easy broad he'd picked up at the bar and brought home last night—the boil reduced to a simmer, but the angry surprise remained.

She leaned, still half-asleep, against the doorway and eyed him lazily; she was wearing his Opeth shirt. Who the hell did she think she was wearing one of his shirts? Just because they'd fucked didn't mean it was now a free for all. What if Baek came up here and saw her?

"Go put some clothes on, will you?" he rasped, standing in front of the silks as if to protect them. "Then get out of here."

Her eyes narrowed, the sleep fading from her eyes.

"Oh, so that's how it's going to be?" she huffed, hand on a hip. Women...

"Yup."

"Do you even re_member _my name?"

Of course he remembered her name, but he wasn't about to blurt it out and make her think she was special. One good thing about being a gangster was that he was forced to know everyone around him, even if they'd no idea of his existence. It kept him wary. It kept him alive. It kept him at the top. If he didn't know his own turf he might as well hand it over to his enemies.

"Just get out of here before I call your parents and tell them how much of a slut you are."

"You don't even know my parents."

"You mean the accountants who live on the first floor of that apartment complex next to the sushi bar? The converted Catholics who buy cheap kimchi?"

If looks could kill, he would have been shot, burned alive and thrown to the vultures from the glare of utter hatred emanating from her gaze.

"_Horo_," she muttered as she eventually retreated to his bedroom.

Any other insult wouldn't have bothered him—save for the one she just flung into his face.

Lunging for her, he seized her arm in a grip hard enough to keep her in place, but gently enough not to yield a bruise; he wouldn't want to give her an excuse to press charges now would he. Not when everything was finally falling into place after nine years. Well, in a manner of speaking.

"Let go of me!" she shrieked, and he clapped a hand over her mouth.

"Call me that again," he dared behind clenched teeth, his face centimeters from hers.

He would never strike a woman; that was for cowards. But he had discovered other ways to enforce the law, and sometimes a simple threat of might was required. So when she remained silent, her fear-stricken flesh perspiring beneath his palm, the boy smirked. Respect earned at last.

"You don't know anything about me, Kwan Youngeun. But_ I_ know you. If you _ever_ insult me again, I suggest you watch your back."

Letting his words sink in, he waited until fearful understanding glinted in her dark eyes, and then released her. From the doorway he watched her change her clothes, wolfish eyes re-devouring the vulnerable nakedness; suddenly she was no longer appealing, but he kept his eyes locked on her, enjoying the way she wilted beneath his gaze. _I'm the one with the power, not you._

Cotton panties and purple polyester skirt glided over pale thighs to hug hip and buttock, thin bra to shield trembling breasts, gold heels recovered from a corner where they were haphazardly thrown—his Opeth shirt folded neatly on the made bed. She didn't look at him once, her face flushing as red as his hair—ironic, as she had no qualms about screwing like rabbits the night previous. She'd been pretty good too.

But now she knew who he was and what he was capable of. _I _will_ have the respect I deserve._

Maybe his father had instilled that within him. Maybe it had been the gang. Regardless, Hwoarang knew this hardness was taking its toll. He kind of liked this Kwan girl, but to open himself to such a thing would require softness, and there was no room for softness on the streets. Hardened hands, hardened head, and especially hardened heart. You had to smile like it was nothing or keep drawing blood to prove your strength-or until you had nothing left to bleed. _  
_

It was what being a man meant. Right?

A man didn't wander outside alone in the eerie hours of night to serenade his dead mother, nor did he wish that he could lie in bed curled fetal position, as was how everyone began, and take a break from gang life.

There. He admitted it.

His gang was his family. When a boy lacked that crucial father figure he needed someone to hold onto. Baek was great and all, but Hwoarang needed people who could understand the strife and be angry and lonely and vengeful with him. Misery loved company, as they said, and he wasn't yet mature enough to rise above it. Perhaps he never would be, and that frightened him.

Sometimes he wanted to wish the gang away and live like Baek wanted him to. Like his mother wanted him to.

* * *

**Glossary**

_anyio -_ no

_byuel dong byuel_ - shooting star**  
**

_horo _– a term used to insult a person who has no parents

_pumsae_ - Tae Kwon Do patterns or forms

_soju_ - alcohol, comparable to vodka


	4. Hide and Seek

**So full of symbolism it's disgusting. Some obvious, some not. XD I had fun writing this one. ~ _Sage_**

* * *

**4 – Hide and Seek

* * *

**

**-Seoul-**

Shimmery emeralds, patina green. Crimsons deep and iridescent as hummingbird feathers. Blues as deep and alluring as the sea. Amber gold and violets bold, feather-soft, like trying to hold mist.

The silks stared back at him, blinking staccato eyes blinded from the morning sunlight.

Guilt gnawed at him—voracious. Aching. After all these years of pulling open the closet door and peering at those useless pieces of fabric, he still didn't understand what she was trying to tell him the day they explored the markets. She had spoken of purpose and beauty and brevity, things a child cared not for. He shook his head. Her cryptic musings escaped him easily, though they enjoyed haunting him from time to time.

These piles of silks were his mother's last gift to him. That was one thing he couldn't erase, could never bring himself to move forward from. He had to wear them somehow, let them slip over the dried regions of skin like a dainty caress, sheathing scar and secret, limb and flesh, transforming the gray and indigo-bruised contours of muscle and sinew into all the colors of the world. _Every good Korean boy needed one._

And what if he wasn't "good?" Even with the guitar in his hands, he couldn't completely eradicate blood and victory-lust from his thoughts, which in turn crept and stole their way into inspiration and melody. He was used to creating chaos—profitable chaos, that is, so he left the creation of beauty to others of more honorable hearts.

Still, this would be a last honor to the good part of him buried six feet beneath a stone memorial and magenta _mugunghwa_. If it was the last thing he ever did, he would find a way to make that _hanbok_ his mother desired for him—even if he didn't feel at all "good" while wearing it.

Gathering the silks, he placed them into a suitcase and began a new search. Perhaps he had a purpose now.

* * *

"Do you take me for a fool? These aren't even well-made!"

"Then there's the door."

Frustrated, Hwoarang, dragging the suitcase behind him, stormed out of the glittery suburban two-story that supposedly housed the most talented seamstress in Seoul.

She was also the one who charged the highest prices, and who didn't mind cheating the elderly and the desperate for every _won_ they were worth. Whoever thought she was the best had to do a serious fact check. As sewing-challenged as he was, Hwoarang knew talent when he saw it, and this woman's work was fit for the prostitutes who stalked the corners of his neighborhood: frayed, used, beaten and damaged.

She'd been the fourth failure today. The teenager had been searching all morning and afternoon for a seamstress worthy of his mother's silks—_his_ silks—but none had seemed right. Too old; their arthritis-mangled fingers might slip and ruin the fabric. Too young; they've inadequate experience to create anything wearable. Too cheap; how could that guarantee high quality? Too expensive; he would not be taken advantage of.

But now his fastidiousness had accomplished nothing. The silks, though free of the dust blankets that once smothered them, had but moved from one prison to another. The small suitcase bulged from all sides like a fat cocoon pregnant with moth. Hwoarang smirked and sat down upon the street curb, remembering his mother's moth-eaten tales.

Turning his back on the suitcase, he purchased a plate of _kimbap_ from a nearby vendor, and wondered if he was losing his mind—honest to God, legitimately losing his mind, not a temporary spell brought on by stress and frustration.

When he turned around the suitcase was gone.

Choking on the rice and seaweed, he turned in all directions, heart rate rising with the panic in his gut. Maybe he _was_ losing his mind.

But no, there was the boy down the street to his left, no older than seven or eight, making off with the little silk-stuffed suitcase cocoon.

"Oi! Get back here!" the redhead screamed, rice spewing from his mouth as he sprinted for the boy.

As he ran, he realized how much it would destroy him if he lost the silks.

So he ran faster.

Faster until his sides pinched and his chest caught fire and his lungs wheezed for more air.

Faster until the world melted like Dali's clocks; faster until he caught up with the boy and seized the suitcase in one hard lunge. The thief tripped over his feet and kissed concrete, but was up as fast as he'd gone down, giggling through a scraped mouth and a nose studded with gravel. To the redhead's fury, the boy fled into a woman's arms before Hwoarang could unleash his revenge.

"Huan! I've been looking all over for you! What did you—how did—did you steal—"

Exasperated, the woman looked up, red-faced, and apologized profusely.

"I'm _so_ sorry, sir. I turned my back just for a second and he was gone, and his mother is going to kill me—"

"Miss," Hwoarang heaved, clutching his chest and suitcase as if it was his last breath. "It's. O. Kay. I've done. Worse. When I was. His age."

He didn't know what had come over him. Usually he'd be yelling obscenities by now, but he found his tongue betraying him. Maybe it was because he couldn't quite breathe properly—or perhaps it was because he found himself immediately attracted to the woman. She wasn't sex goddess Eun-Mi, or naïve girl next door Youngeun. This girl was, quite possibly, both and more. He couldn't explain it. She was deceivingly simple looking. Long dark hair pulled back into a disheveled ponytail, mouth like a ripe strawberry.

Hwoarang felt himself caught. Another conquest was at hand, perhaps?

"Are you from around here?" he blurted.

"Yeah."

"Is that why you have an accent?"

"So?"

"So where you _from _then?" he pressed, nearly forgetting his little spat with the boy hiding behind her legs.

"Tianjin," she conceded.

"You're too pretty to be Chinese."

So what if he favored Korean girls. He was feeling bold today. Hell, everyday.

"She's only _part _Chinese," Huan quipped, and the woman glared at the boy to silence him.

"How 'bout we talk about this over lunch?" Hwoarang offered, oozing charm.

She didn't buy it.

"Well, I'm sorry again," she said with perfunctory smile. "But I have to get my cousin home now."

So that's who that thieving brat was.

"Wait! _Irumi mwo shimnikka!"_ he shouted as she fled.

But the girl didn't answer. When he couldn't see her anymore, the swing of her ponytail swallowed up into the crowd, Hwoarang headed back the way he'd come. Smiling to himself, he thought he'd never see the day when he let a pretty girl out of his sight—and have her reject him in the same breath. Yet he was accustomed to rejection, infrequent as that was, as he was accustomed to loneliness.

But as he snaked through the swarms of people, locusts in a neon-polluted metropolis, he realized how small he seemed. He looked around himself, peering into faces he would never see twice, inhaling smells unique to these parts, listening for familiar voices, hoping to see the Chinese-Korean girl with her bandit cousin, or a gang member lollygagging out of bounds. Something recognizable. A constant.

But he was adrift at sea, anchorless in an ocean of ever-changing faces and white noise, with nothing but fragments trapped tight in a black suitcase too small to hold anything more than a few necessities. Turn a corner and everything changed. At home you've a big name, a memorable face, but stray too far and you're nothing but a dot on a map.

Disgusted, Hwoarang flung the thought to the back of his mind to brood later. He had big things to do yet. No need to start moping about nothing.

_Huan_. The thought occurred to him later as he knocked on yet another seamstress' door. She'd be number five.

He wasn't a multilingual genius, but he'd picked up some Mandarin from other students during his primary school years. Bits and pieces here and there, everywhere.

The name meant "happiness."

Hwoarang hoped one day the kid was diagnosed with manic depression. That would teach his parents to give their child a corny-ass name and then let him run rampant stealing people's suitcases.

The gang leader knocked again, louder and more insistent, until the door finally opened.

This one looked at him blank-faced, pale, as if she'd been expecting him and had become tired of waiting. Stress lines etched shadowy grooves in her face; she was young and old at the same time. Hwoarang greeted her, told her about his silks, about the price he was willing to pay, but all the while she did not speak. Her eyes were warm though and her hands talented, and she explored the suitcase contents with knowing fingers.

Genuine. Worthy perhaps.

Five evolutions to get it right.

**-Soul-**

The Japanese practically worship their cherry blossom trees. With cameras in tow and mouth agape, they easily lose themselves during springtime, when the black trees are bursting with pale pink and white, the delicate petals snowing upon black hair and stony ground.

Koreans aren't much different.

The first time Sun and I took Hwoarang to Gyeongju for his birthday, during the spring festivals when the trees were ripe, the boy was ecstatic. As sullen as the six-year-old could become—his father hadn't yet left them—the trees brought him joy.

On the drive home, the boy begged his mother to plant a cherry blossom tree in the front yard so they wouldn't have to make the exhaustive journeys to see them.

Sun, though pleased her son was happy, refused.

The cherry trees are beautiful, there's no doubt about it.

But that beauty is fleeting. As soon as they bloom, they die.

Better to travel long miles to marvel at lovely death than to have it sit in front of you always.

Sun had always been superstitious that way.

Of course, if you ask Hwoarang now about his cherry blossom infatuation, he'll deny it to his death. A macho eighteen-year-old alpha gang banger wouldn't dare appreciate such pristine beauty, let alone the color_ pink_. He'd much rather drink himself blind, fight for dirty money, and color his hair that grotesque red.

Never mind that though. To preserve some semblance of peace, I've decided to nurture his free spirit rather than pull and prod at poorly hidden secrets.

Hopefully this motorcycle will serve him well.

Then again, I should return it. But it's his birthday in two days, and we all know he'd rather spend it with that brood of street mongrels rather than with someone so "old-fashioned." So why not give him an early present, one worthy enough to commemorate his day into official adulthood?

No, I think I'll return it.

**-Seoul-**

"Whoa."

Hwoarang gawked at the black and silver motorcycle Baek was trying—and failing—to discreetly park in a nearby alley. The older man flinched inwardly; it took all of his control not to mount the bike and speed away. His student always returned from his meanderings at the worst of times.

"Oh about, ah, this thing that I, um, have here," Baek stammered, unable to look the boy in the eye. Hwoarang didn't notice.

"Did you get this for me, _sah bum nim_? Is this _mine_?" the redhead beamed with hopeful eyes. He looked like he was six again.

Baek closed his eyes momentarily. Nonononono—

"_Ne_. It sure is."

Hwoarang shouted with joy, nearly shoving his mentor as he reached for the bike, smoothing long fingers over shining metal and hard black leather.

"Where's the key?" he asked Baek, a crazy grin distorting his mouth.

Baek cocked an eyebrow at the rare expression as he presented the key, which the redhead snatched.

"I got you a helm—"

But before he could finish, the bike roared awake, an angry black beast. Cackling with pleasure, Hwoarang took off down the street, his scarlet hair and leather jacket whipping in the wind.

Baek realized suddenly that he'd just given his student the perfect means to run away. Hwoarang had threatened to take off plenty of times before, but had always trudged back home due to lack of money and transportation. But now, with steady cash from gang life and a sparkly new motorcycle, Baek had all but shoved Hwoarang out the door.

"Hwoarang! Hwoarang, come back!"

He hadn't felt this scared since Sun Jung's death. For a moment, as the teen became but a speck down the street, Baek feared he would not return. But, just before he disappeared from the older man's line of sight, the boy veered sharply to avoid a bicyclist—and turned back towards his mentor. As the bike grumbled to a halt at Baek's side, he couldn't disguise the angry concern—and relief—on his face.

"What's wrong, _sah bum nim_? It's not like I ran over anything—yet," the redhead said, chuckling.

"Be careful, Boy," Baek rebuked. "You make sure you always come back!"

"Uh okay."

"'Okay'? That's it?"

"Yes?"

"Don't get smart with me, Hwoarang."

"Is there something wrong, Master?"

"Of course not."

Yes there was. Nowadays there always was.

"Here," Baek grunted, shoving a black helmet into the boy's hands. "You better wear it every time you get on that thing."

"Sure thing, Master." No way in hell.

Sighing, Baek retreated to the apartment.

**-Soul-**

Our lunch sits untouched in front of us, irritating the waitress, who hovers like a goddamn fly. When she asks again if we're ready for the bill, I swat her away with a flick of my hand.

They keep looking at me oddly, save for Byung, who stares straight ahead, still recovering from last night. I don't know where Kwan got the stuff, but we were all flying on dragons and eating stardust after a few hits. I rub my eyes, wondering if it's the drugs or lack of sleep that's got me jittery this morning. I'm not one for trying anything stronger than weed, but last night's trip had been necessary to subdue the sudden tragedy. Our youngest, Jae Hwa, took a razor to his wrists after our Jung-gu archrivals—the same bastards who tried to kill Baek—raped his girlfriend in front of him, and then robbed him blind. The kid should have called on us for help, the fucking moron. I always knew he was too unstable for the streets.

We were five once. Now it's down to a four far from fantastic.

"Why don't you guys tell me why the hell you're looking at me like that?" I demand.

"We're waiting for you tell us our next move, boss," Sung replies bluntly. "We hate sitting on our asses while Hwa is dead."

"Those Jung-gu motherfuckers think they have fuckin' free reign," Byung snaps, fidgeting with his spiky hair. "We hafta to do something!"

"We need to think about this," I begin, but Kwan cuts me off.

"What for? It's simple: we hunt them down on their own turf, and we kill 'em," the twenty-three year old snarls, the look of a rabid dog in his eyes. "No money. No games. Just blood."

"That's the drugs talkin', Kwan."

"_Shut_ _up_, Hwoarang."

Byung and Sung look on in silence, waiting for me to react. The gang doesn't dare disrespect me—save for Kwan, apparently. No one doubts that he still holds a grudge against me when I usurped his leadership three years ago. Regardless, there's no use fighting amongst one another; that's what our enemies would want.

Rather, I nod, though somewhat reluctantly, and gesture for Kwan to explain his plan.

When he finishes, I agree with everything but one crucial detail.

"We're not killing anyone."

"What!" Byung explodes. "We're gonna let those bastards screw with us?"

"Calm down, or you're sitting this one out, Byung," I warn, keeping my composure. "If_ any_ of you try to kill them—I'll kill you myself. We're not murderers, you hear?"

"The hell is wrong with you, man?" Kwan blurts. "We have to take our revenge. Giving them a beating isn't enough."

"In case you've forgotten, nobody killed Jae Hwa but himself. If he had just asked us for help, no one would have died."

"Hwo's right, guys," Sung interjects. "We're not killers. That's not why we're here."

Trust Sung to always have my back. It's no wonder he's my favorite.

"Fine. We let them live," Kwan relents. "But no more holding back. No more games."

"No. No more games."

**-Seoul-**

That evening, and every evening from then on, Hwoarang visited his mute seamstress to check on his hanbok's progress.

As she toiled on the silken rainbows in her lap—occasionally beckoning for Hwoarang to model the fabric for her so she could make the appropriate cuts and measurements—the redhead strategized about how best to exact revenge on the Jung-gu gang without taking a life. Though he'd demanded that his gang refrain from such an act, killing was awfully tempting. Of all of them, Jae Hwa had been the weakest; he'd also been the most loved, the little brother they'd spoiled and never dared reprimand. Perhaps the Jung-gu boys had known.

Oh yes, murder was tempting.

Then again, how would it feel like to kill a man? To obliterate the light in his eyes, crush the breath in his chest?

The thought sent shivers rippling through his flesh. Hwoarang wasn't a killer, that much he knew.

Tomorrow, April fifth, he would be nineteen, considered a man. The cherry trees would be in bloom. But tomorrow, he and his gang would set out for the nearby neighborhoods of Jung-gu.

This was war now. Nothing was certain, save for the quiet unease weaving doubt in his chest.

* * *

**Glossary**

_Irumi mwo shimnikka?_ – What's your name?

_kimbap_ – rice and other ingredients rolled in dried seaweed (similar to Japanese sushi rolls)


	5. II: Man

**Short and not so sweet. ~Sage

* * *

**

**5 – II: Man**

**

* * *

**

**-Seoul-**

Whenever fighting became used for means other than winning _won_, things never went well.

There was something coiling within the pit of his stomach, a tightening ache in his throat and chest caused by something other than adrenaline; he hadn't felt this way since his father began beating his mother all those years ago. Hwoarang didn't know what this feeling was, but it spread as fast as synapses exploding in his brain, rotted and purpled like bruises erupting along wounded flesh, a dormant disease saved solely for dark times like these.

They waited until doors shut and lights dimmed like dying candlewicks, until windows blackened like a blindfold over the eyes. It was another cool spring evening, another birthday. He was a man now, and his first rite of passage into manhood would be to prove his strength, though in ways that made him more nervous than it should. Though he and his brood were thirsting for revenge, Hwoarang felt that something wasn't quite right.

But he couldn't let Jae Hwa down. So there the gang waited in a tiny upscale _coffee_house, of all places, as unassuming in their conversations and forced espresso smiles as they could be, waiting until the baristas kicked them out at closing time so they had an excuse to trek the streets. They were in Jung-gu territory now; the bawdy women, flavorless cuisine and pathetically rendered graffiti murals were proof of it. But they hoped the wolves by now had picked up their scent for they had planted themselves there like unwelcome weeds.

It didn't take long. When the Seoul boys finally found themselves on deserted asphalt their rivals approached, three from the left, the other half from the right, like a sloppy v-formation.

"Let's skip the posturing this time and just get on with it, shall we?" Hwoarang said with a wink to his enemies, an expression belying the terrible beating of his heart.

_You've beaten these fools before, remember? When they tried to kill Baek?_

Then why were his legs trembling?

"You're always ruining the fun, Doo San Hwoarang."

Yeuno, the leader, stepped forward with a smug look on his face. Though slightly shorter than Hwoarang, Yeuno boasted nearly equal speed and agility as the redhead. _Nearly, _Hwoarang thought, though he knew he couldn't fight Yeuno as he had Hyo from Incheon. Hyo might be trigger happy, but Yeuno was a vindictive bastard who knew where to make it hurt. Jae Hwa was only the beginning—unless, of course, Hwoarang did something about it, which he intended to.

Beside Yeuno stood a boy half his height. Hwoarang guessed he couldn't be more than eleven or twelve years old, if even that.

"The hell is a kid doin' here?" he barked.

Even if the child was as nasty as any gangster, the redhead despised his round, pudgy cheeks and scrawny limbs; he was fucking innocent, for God's sake.

_Don't be like me. Go home to your mother. Good God, why are you here right now!_

Yeuno smiled at Hwoarang's unease and flipped a switchblade back and forth between his fingers. His right arm was sheathed in a tiger tattoo. Its yellow eyes seemed to stare back at the redhead.

"He's my lil bro Chung Hee," Yeuno replied with pride. "I'm here to show him how things are done."

"Get lost, you little brat," Hwoarang snapped. "Go play your video games or something."

"Go to hell," the boy sneered.

Hwoarang ground his teeth. So be it.

"Come on then," he said, eyes returning to the Jung-gu gang leader. "Let's get on with it."

"What's the rush? Don't you want to know the look on Jae Hwa's face when I fucked his girl?"

"You piece of shit."

Around him, his gang exploded into a mass of seething rage, legs and fists, echoing _kihap_, the sound of flesh colliding with flesh rising through the quiet deserted streets.

Hwoarang lunged.

**-Soul-**

Usually I go into fights or tournaments knowing I'm gonna win. Arrogance keeps me alive, but it's factual arrogance, ya know? I _am _that good.

But when I see that Jung-gu bastard attacking Sung, his knife pointed at my best friend's jugular—that's when I get that fucking _feeling_ again.

That…_fear_.

I haven't felt fear since Ummah died. But now that fear rushes through my blood, makes me slow, makes me dizzy, sloppy, distracted. I try to fight it, but fear is a relentless motherfucker. It's as if I know something bad is about to happen.

And that's when Yeuno's switchblade carves a smiley face in flesh.

Blood gushes from Sung's throat like a river.

**-Seoul-**

He wasn't thinking anymore.

As Kwan distracted Yeuno and Byung kept the others at bay, Hwoarang leaped to Sung's side and applied pressure to his friend's throat in a futile effort to stop the bleeding. But Sung couldn't even talk. His eyes could though, and in those black irises Hwoarang read that same fear that had been eating at him since the night of Jae Hwa's suicide.

"Hang on, man," Hwoarang crooned with a shaky smile. "You're gonna be okay."

But the bleeding wouldn't stop; he was choking on his blood. Bubbles of it spurted and popped at the corners of his mouth. Red pooled around them both, soaked through Hwoarang's jacket and jeans, stained his shirt and hands.

"_Sung!_ Goddamn you, Il-Sung, _don't you fucking die on me_!"

But, within seconds, the redhead watched as the life oozed from his friend's flesh, as those eyes dimmed and became unseeing, unknowing. Years of friendship sliced into nothing.

Inside Hwoarang, a light sputtered out.

Breathing heavily, his head spinning, he dipped his hands into Sung's blood and raked the trembling, bloody fingers through his fiery hair. Red on red on red.

"_Yeuno!"_

He wasn't thinking anymore.

Yeuno and Kwan paused mid-fight, angry tears brimming in Kwan's eyes; Yeuno, however, was smiling. His switchblade yet dripped with Sung's blood. Too fresh. Too fresh.

Hwoarang was right; he _was _faster than Yeuno.

With a single tornado kick the redhead broke the Jung-gu gang leader's jaw, sending Yeuno sprawling into concrete. Blood spouted from between his lips as he moaned in agony, but Hwoarang continued to advance.

"Get up!" he cried, lashing out with a ruthless, perfect kick to Yeuno's ribcage.

In the distance, somewhere behind the red wrath ringing in his ears, he thought he heard the high-pitched voice of a boy pleading for him to stop. Hwoarang ignored it. There could be no mercy this time.

"You'll pay for this," Hwoarang growled as he forced his enemy to his feet and delivered a series of devastating kicks to every sensitive, excruciating pressure point. Crack of bone and tear of muscle, blood like the kind that still trickled from Sung's throat; he was God tonight. Tonight he would take back all that was lost. Yeuno howled in pain, the smile long gone from his face.

He kept kicking until Yeuno lied still on the pavement, until he too was swimming in a blood pool as large as the one Sung laid in. Hwoarang never once picked up the switchblade; that would have been cheating, would have been unfair to Sung. Besides, he needed to release this angry fear somehow, needed to feed the tiger suddenly awakened within him, and no piece of sharp silver could do the job like Tae Kwon Do could.

When he finally tired, Hwoarang staggered backward and stumbled to the ground. His heart felt like it would burst from his chest. Trickles of his best friend's blood slithered down his hair and into his face.

"Get…up…" he rasped, nudging Yeuno with a boot.

But his Jung-gu rival didn't move—didn't breathe.

He finally started hearing Chung Hee then. He was wailing something…something…

_"He's dead! You killed my brother!" _

What? He couldn't have. Not when he'd told the gang specifically not to take a life.

But when Yeuno remained motionless, his eyes like stones, Hwoarang felt cold fear suffocating him once more.

"_Anyio_," he moaned. "It was an accident. I didn't mean—"

"Come on, Hwo, we need to get the fuck outta here."

"Wait. Sung—"

"_Come on!_"

Still dazed, he allowed Byung and Kwan to lift him up and drag him away. His gaze lingered long enough to see Chung Hee and the other Jung-gu gangsters gather around their dead leader. The boy cradled his brother's body in his skinny arms, blood and tears streaking his cheeks.

"I'll find you!" Chung Hee screamed after Hwoarang. "You'll pay for this!"

* * *

It was an accident. He'd just been so angry. So afraid. He couldn't take much more, and of course he'd known Yeuno would try such a thing, so his death was justified, right? It was going to be okay. Sung was avenged.

But that look in Chung Hee's eyes, the heartbreak in his shrill little voice, haunted him yet. Rage was even more potent at that age. Even so, the threat of a boy wasn't what kept him awake at night.

_Murderer._

The looks on Kwan and Byung's faces told him the truth; it was a mixture of fear and respect, but for reasons he wished didn't exist. He wanted Sung by his side more than ever. Now he was stuck with these two bloodthirsty morons who knew nothing of what it meant to be alive.

"Kwan. Byung," Hwoarang mumbled through chapped lips. "I need to go away for awhile. Don't tell Baek."

"You can stay at my place if you want," Byung offered.

"No. It's too dangerous. From now on, we're on our own. I'm sorry this happened."

"It's not your fault, Hwoarang."

"Yes it is. We should never have been there in the first place."

"Where will you go?"

Hwoarang hung his head, knowing he shouldn't involve her, or anyone innocent for that matter. He should really just bunk with Byung and wait this war out. It wasn't like him to hide...but he hadn't thought it like him to _kill _either.

"I know a place," he finally answered. She won't like it, but then again maybe he didn't have to tell her why he was there.

"When the time comes, I'll call on you again. But for now...disappear."

**-Soul-**

Thank you, sah bum nim. That's what I've been trying to say all along.

You gave me everything when I was nothing.

I...I killed a man last night.

Please don't try to look for me. I'll be close, that's all I can tell you.

I'm sorry for everything.


	6. III: Runaway

**6 – III: Runaway **

* * *

** -Soul-**

After I find his note, I begin to hear music.

Deep into the night's quiet, when even the owl's begin to nest, the guitar's voice wails from somewhere above me. Sometimes it begins as a low, long moan, or as a soft, unrelenting whine, like that ringing in your ear after listening to loudness. Yet other times it strikes like lightning, rumbles and rolls across the roof like a thunderstorm, vengeful, unannounced and uncaring for order.

_All I got is time; got no meaning, just a rhyme._

The first time it happened, I ran up to the roof where I hoped to catch him. He'd probably sneaked back when I'd been sleeping. But when I reach the roof, there is never anyone there.

_Take time with a wounded hand, 'cause it likes to heal._

Sometimes I sit on that roof all night and wait for him to come back, if not to see his teacher, then maybe for that guitar, his invisible fifth limb.

But mostly, I retreat to the warmth of my apartment and stand in the doorway to Hwoarang's room. I never enter. But I allow myself to look upon the remnants of what I have partially made, upon the posters of rock stars and abstract paintings lining the white walls, to the beaten leather boots and frayed punching bag hidden in the far corner. To the windows with blinds drawn, like eyes closed, to the amplifier gathering dust. To the red and black guitar leaned carefully against the unmade bed, the imprint of his body yet rumpling the sheets and denting the pillow, as if he'd awoken but this morning and is wolfing down breakfast in the kitchen, the wooden chopsticks moving like heat-lightning from bowl to mouth.

But nothing remains now but this desultory museum of the life I once nurtured with my two hands, a nucleus turned to powdery shell. I have made history, at least. I have lived to see life and death as one.

Sometimes love destroys more than what it creates.

_I'm half the man I used to be._

One day I lock Hwoarang's bedroom door and force my ears to hear nothing. Silent night, unholy night.

The boy has a gift for breaking beautiful things. But oh, how beautifully he breaks.

**-Seoul-**

He wrote his name on a paper napkin and set it in front of her, gesturing for her to do the same.

"Go on," he urged, patting the pen. "Write your name. I want to know who you are."

But the voiceless seamstress merely smiled and continued her work. Sighing, Hwoarang turned away and crumpled the napkin in his hand, but held his frustration in check; he wouldn't dare become angry over little things, not when she had agreed to work so hard for him—not when she'd agreed to let him stay with her until things calmed down. Who knew how long that would take. Months, maybe. Years, likely. The blood was still fresh. He could taste it in his sleep.

"You remind me a lot of my mother, you know," he began.

He didn't know why he was talking, just that he was talking and needed to hear the words. Maybe it was easier talking to someone who couldn't speak back, who couldn't offer pretend compassion or spew small talk to subdue those impromptu confessions of pain. But though she was silent, the seamstress judged and spoke equally with her eyes as others did with their words, and in her gaze Hwoarang knew he was a coward for taking advantage of her silence like this; he could insult her and she would utter nothing. He could hurt her and she would not shout. He could tell her his heart's secrets and she would tell no one, no matter how horrific they may be. But instead he spoke to her mercifully and helped her with her home, not because he sought vindication through domestic duties and not even because of some goodness in his heart, but because he knew she was all he had left, she was one who could not understand, and in her ignorance he found a private salvation, like getting lost in a good book before reality and social obligation pushed you into the outside world to fight for things that never belonged to you in the first place.

"Sometimes I think I was born with a big mouth so I could balance out her silence," Hwoarang continued with a faraway smirk. "I wish she was here so she could see that I'm finally getting hanbok, you know? 'Wings,' she called them. Whatever that means. Old people always talk in metaphors anyway."

But she hadn't been old, had she, when she'd first woven him the story of the moths? Thirty maybe. Twenty-five? Hwoarang didn't bother to remember. Rather, he watched the seamstress, who was indefatigable in her work. A flicker of her eyes indicated she was listening. Of course she was listening. Lose that skill and she would lose the world.

He wondered when the seamstress would die. Right now, maybe, when relatively young. Soon. Wrapped in regretful, mouthless cocoon, as the world moved, indifferent, and sang and wept and churned and danced on. How did moth days compare to human years?

_Sometimes you dream about Sung. Sometimes you can't get that Chung Hee kid outta your head. Sometimes you find yourself taking too many looks behind you as you walk._

Five evolutions to get it right.

_Eat, shit, fuck and die. Kinda like humans?_

**-Soul-**

I remember the last time I was happy.

I'm not talking about orgasmic release, or amusement park excitement or pride or even peace. I'm talking about raw bliss. A poisonous, fleeting, wild bliss that leaves you thinking, for one stupid moment, that everything is all right.

As dumb as everyone thinks I am, the truth is I'm smart, but I just can't seem_ too_ smart. Otherwise people start expecting things from you. It's enough that you've already developed impossible expectations for yourself. I can paint metaphors, I can sit in the library reading Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare, and I can study physics for three hours straight—I just _won't._ I'm not programmed for the stories of other men.

I suppose that's why I used to steal and fuck and kill as I please. I was learning man's mistakes all over again. Perhaps that makes me an embarrassment to evolution. I guess I'm not so smart after all.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. Being happy. That ultimate cliché, the _only_ cliché, that matters.

Happiness. Now there's some sort of airy, heavenly, cheesy ass quality to that word that makes you wanna eat candy and choke. "Hap" starts like a laugh or like a sigh, "pi" a little harsher but still on wispy clouds, and then the "ness," the lowered intonation, the descent, the final realization. I'm on the "hap" part, but I've experienced it to the "ness" only once.

The funny thing is that that genuine "ness" moment had nothing to do with my mother or with Baek, not even with my guitar (I miss that damn thing by the way).

I reached "ness" with my father. It was the closest thing to enlightenment I've ever experienced—sorry, Siddhartha—but I can honestly say that it happened.

It was before I became his punching bag. We were at the grocery store of all places, the most boring, uninspiring setting for a heart-to-heart-to-happiness, but that's where it was. I was six. He was looking at the prices on the jars of kimchi. Unlike my mother, Dad liked to talk. He told jokes every day he got home from work; he talked about the ins and outs of his job, about the gum he stepped on outside; he talked through his soup and in his sleep, and when he wasn't talking he was singing. He was by no means the stereotypical strong silent breadwinner, though he was built like a redwood tree and stood taller than I stand today at nineteen.

Anyway, on that grocery trip he got quiet, as he always did when he was making crucial decisions—red bean or sesame?—and as a typical kid who worshipped his father, I watched and adored his every move.

Then Dad paused at the freezer, fished out a box of Popsicles, tore the thing open before he'd paid for it, and stuffed a honey dew flavored one into my sticky mouth. Then he smiled at me, big and crooked, and told me not to tell my mother. Every now and then throughout that day he'd stop what he was doing and just look down at me and smile.

That's it. Pretty fancy, huh.

So when he started beating me I got all fucked up, as you can imagine.

Maybe that's why I'm still fucked up now, in the streets, between walls, hiding, fighting for wrong reasons, watching people die and hurt for sport. Something in the wiring went amiss, and I guess I shouldn't blame Dad, because I'm supposed to mature and "get over it."

I love how people say that loneliness is a choice, and that you have a goddamn choice to suck it up and forgive, forget, and move on. Rise above the lower ladders and be a better man. It seems so easy when they say it, but strap them into your boots and see how they fare. Then there are two monsters instead of one.

You can't hustle happy. You can't pull the trigger to happy. You can't win happy.

But sometimes you can remember it—or, at least, imagine how you would remember it.

You wait for it your whole life and you don't even know you're waiting. You chase it forever.

**-Seoul-**

Nights bled into days without clotting; they were, to him, one and the same. One book opened. The other closed. Silent stories of the wished-for-but-never forgotten. He wasn't the sentimental type, but every feeling he'd ever suppressed flooded his chest harder than a kick to the groin. Bedridden, he could not even protest as the seamstress covered him with blankets and left steaming soup and rice at his bedside table. Only a few days, he promised himself, promises that turned into a few weeks. A year.

A year later he rose from the bed, as if a beast from its snowy hibernation, and stepped outside. The sun felt nice on his face, like the smile that had fled his mouth. He must look like death. Lingering, creeping, pale death, Seoul his River Styx, soul his dead companions and undying grief—he folded that away, tucked it under some softness in his chest like a diary under a mattress. No one but he knew it was there.

Before depositing his dishes into the kitchen sink, he raked a weary hand through his hair and slid on some old jeans he forgot he owned, and then, slowly, tugged on a T-shirt Sung had bought him for his sixteenth birthday. He really had to stop being so sentimental.

"'Morning," he mumbled, bowing his head slightly to the seamstress already seated at the table. He shuffled to the sink and began to scrub at his dishes, hard, as if to scrub away the porcelain itself. The dishes screeched long black lines in the sink.

"Sorry," he said when the seamstress turned to look at him. "It's just…they're pretty dirty."

But she knew everything already, of course, and flashed him a half smile, but looked away just as quickly; she understood he hated that look, any look for that matter, that reflected even the slightest inklings of sympathy. He was twenty now, almost twenty-one, but numbers didn't matter, for he felt seven again, curled up in a ball in a corner as his father's booted feet came crashing down onto his body. He never thought a person could diminish past forgotten, past sorrowed nothingness, but there he stood doing dishes, in someone else's sink, trying to turn things back white, hiding like a shunned dog with its tail between the alpha's teeth—he scrubbed the dishes harder.

"I'm goin' out today," he announced, so loudly the seamstress shifted in her seat. "You said you needed more red. Right?"

He was lying, and they both knew it. All the silk the seamstress had was sufficient, as his mother had been terribly thorough in her selections, but what other excuse could Hwoarang make to step out of this cave and find out what the world had left him with, what he had missed? He supposed he could just leave and return as he wished, because the seamstress wouldn't be able to protest anyway. But he still felt, out of some unprecedented courtesy, that he had to ask for permission, or had to at least make some sort of announcement. He should be freer than ever now, and yet he felt chained to her silence, as if being silent in return would break her. It was embarrassing; hell, she wasn't even beautiful.

Pulling on his boots, he strode out the door with the confidence of a man who owned the world, who had nothing to lose, and perhaps it is only the ones reduced to nothing, the ones who own nothing, that can begin to claim anything of the world as theirs. To have nothing is to have everything. Right? He thought so, even as the sun pierced his eyes like a blade and the roar of Seoul's crowd tempted him back into the seamstress' silken silence.

He sneezed as the passing smells of grease and pollen and floral perfume flooded his nose, and for a few seconds he felt as if he'd wandered into another land, one that was not his own and not of his formation. But no, there was the jewelry shop owned by the same two brothers with the same laugh, and there were the boats in the marina on the west side of the bridge, and still there was the same _kimbap_ and fruit vendor across the street from the marina, managed by an old lady with a scar down her nose. Still standing yet, in silent defiance, were the traditional style gardens with their stone statues and yellow birds and budding cherry blossom trees. Was it spring already?

Nothing had changed. But things were different. It was like believing you knew a person, and then discovering they were someone else entirely once you started asking the right questions. They'd never changed; rather, they had always been so. You just never bothered to look closer.

Hwoarang crossed the street before the walk sign dictated it was safe to, and meandered his way to the American taco joint jammed between that jewelry store and the bank. Why that location made sense for foreign food was beyond him, but he opened the door anyway and ordered something or other, he couldn't remember. All he remembered was that he was waiting and that he knew, right before the gang member swaggered in, that Byung would come by around noon for his daily burrito fix. Byung was too damn predictable, and Hwoarang wondered how the Jung-gu bastards hadn't offed him yet. He still looked the same, hair gelled up in that corny Mohawk, the rusted studs in his earlobes, the jagged hangul tattoo on the inside of his right wrist—"Strength" or "Honor," something false and overused. Same shoes too. Some things weren't so different after all.

He didn't have to say a word. Though Byung didn't see Hwoarang at all, even as he sat at a booth some ten feet from him, he felt the redhead's familiar gaze as if it were the sun's heat on his neck.

"So you finally outta hiding, huh?" Byung smirked, turning to face his leader. "Never thought you to be that type."

"You know what type I am," Hwoarang replied. "Why don't you eat with me? Let me know what's going on?"

Byung knew it wasn't a request. Uneasily, he sat across from the redhead and folded his arms over his chest.

"Kwan's dead," he began. There was no point in pleasantries.

Hwoarang didn't flinch, or blink for that matter, though his heartbeat quickened. He had to act like everything was his, like everything was still under control, even if he'd been gone for more than a year. Even if everything had gone wrong.

"How."

"Jung-gu, of course, two of 'em. Waited 'til Kwan got off the graveyard shift, cornered him and shot him. Twice. In the heart," Byung continued. "I told him to watch his fucking back."

"That's kinda hard to do with a damn bullet comin' at you," Hwoarang hissed, showing the first signs of emotion.

"Boss, we just couldn't hold it together. When you disappeared like that…everything disappeared too."

"Except for the Jung-gu."

"Well, yeah."

"Fuck…"

"I know."

"Shut up."

"What'd I do?"

Hwoarang rose from the booth, his hands in his hair, and paced back and forth, back and forth, his tacos untouched in front of him. _Don't lose it, don't you dare lose it…but it's the only way, isn't it._

"It's suicide," he sighed on ragged breath. "We're only two. We can't take 'em all on."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, it's over, Byung. The gang."

The truth was that he and Byung could probably handle what was left of the Jung-gu boys. But he couldn't risk losing another one, the _last _one. Even though Byung was an imbecile—the dumbest of the bunch, in fact—he was still one of his, and always would be.

"Just go live your life. Lemme deal with this, all right?" Hwoarang said.

"_Mwo?_ Just 'cause it's over for us doesn't mean it's over for them. They're looking for you, Hwoarang! They're gonna kill you!"

"You think I'm just gonna let them kill me? You watched me beat Yeuno to death; you know what I can do. They _can't_ beat me."

"Really, huh? So I assume your fancy kicks are faster than a bullet?"

"Just go, Byung. It isn't your problem anymore."

"Bullshit. This isn't like you, man. Are you giving up?"

Without warning, he seized Byung by the neck and slammed him into the wall. Why didn't they ever listen the first time? Did he always have to use force to be convincing? He shouldn't have been reluctant to do so; these were street matters, after all. Dirty blood. He used to thrive on this.

"I'm not giving up. I know exactly what needs to be done. I've always known."

"Is that why you accidentally killed Yeuno?" the gang member wheezed.

Hwoarang's grip tightened dangerously around Byung's neck; for a split second he imagined he saw him dead under his hands, mouth agape in its futile gasps for air. The thought invoked an image of the dead Jung-gu leader, writhing on a blood soaked ground, but Hwoarang urged the memory away. This was different. This was setting the record straight, saving a life, even as he felt the lies building in his throat, even as he felt Byung's frantic pulse beneath his fingers, fluttering like his own.

But Byung was right. A year ago, Hwoarang would have used every gangster to the bone if he'd had to, to win. He never would have broken something he'd worked so hard to create; blood was a part of the bargain. He knew he was expected to march into fights as arrogant as the leader he'd made himself to be, and cut down any and all rivals in his way, and he'd done it before, countless times before, until he'd believed it to be of his nature. Then again, things were different now. The only truths of nature were that things, even the ones seemed rooted in time, always changed, metamorphosed into something more salient, if not profounder.

"Listen, you little wiseass," he growled. "I know things have been tough. But I am, and always will be, better than you. It's done when I say it's done."

At this, he tightened his grip as hard as he dared. "You _know _what I can do. _Ah de suh_?"

After several more seconds, Hwoarang released his former comrade. "Go," he whispered. Byung turned without another word, disappearing out through the glass door as if he'd never been.

Before leaving, Hwoarang slapped a few_ won_ onto the table, for the taco store's owners to fix the crack on the wall from where he'd slammed Byung's head. He didn't know why he now bothered to consider the damage he'd done—to the restaurant and otherwise—but he walked on and bought himself a plate of _bulgogi _and thought of it no more.

What he did think about was how he would face the Jung-gu gang when they did find him, because find him they would. Seoul was large, but not that large. And with a reputation—and, unfortunately, hair—like his, it was just a matter of time. He decided hiding was still his best option until he could think of something better.

As he finished the last few bites of his lunch, he noticed that Chinese-ish girl with her little Happiness cousin—Huan? Yeah, Huan—leaning over the bridge railings throwing rocks into the ocean. She laughed when the boy couldn't lift a rock that was larger than his head, so she seized the rock from his pudgy hands and threw it over the railing for him. He thought it funny that he was seeing them again; he'd always thought that you never saw someone twice in Seoul, not unless you specifically sought them out. But there the woman stood with that thief of a child, throwing rocks into the ocean, which churned and twisted and danced with aquamarine-white froth.

Hwoarang thought seriously about confronting the woman—she'd a mouth like a ripe strawberry, he remembered—but he wiped the grease off his fingers instead and stalked off in the opposite direction, still walking tall and straight, his eyes loose and serene, even as his heart quivered like a moth's wings too close to a flame. Burned. Almost ashen. Third time would be the charm, he supposed, if not the fifth. If he saw her again, he'd say something. Right now, he was worthy of no one's company but his own.

* * *

**Glossary**

_Ah de suh? - _Do you understand?


	7. IV: Protector

**7 – IV: Protector**

* * *

**-Soul-**

They won't say dying.

They say malignant. Advanced.

Do you have any family? You're alone? What a shame. They say it slow, quiet, as if I can't understand that I've a year left, at most. _I'm mute, not stupid. _

While the boy is gone doing the secret things he does I've been going to the hospital during breaks from needle and thread, for the secret bleeding in my belly. If it wasn't for the pain I should be done with the hanbok by now.

It shouldn't be like this. Then again, when is anything as you think it should be?

The boy disappears every day, outside where he once fought and laughed and led other boys to their doom. He runs, roams, and returns smelling like night. And then he'll rise, a deadly sun, and leave again. I wonder how different it would be if I could speak, if I could say his name or explain my heart. But then he would not have sought me out and I would not know any reason to love. To live.

I can imagine what my voice would sound like. Sweet, a tender violin imploring his growling guitar, a dark instrument as hungry as the boy who wields it. He tells me he misses music, but he doesn't dare seek it. He believes he destroys all that he touches, all whom he knows. And now this sudden growth, this blood in my uterus, flowing from wounds that seem to transpire from air.

He doesn't even know my name.

The door creaks open. It's past 3 a.m. He knows not that I am awake, upright at my sewing table like usual, the knots in my belly making me sweat. After four months of going to doctors telling me the same old things I have decided to refuse treatment. If I am to die, I am to die. No one but I need know this.

"You're awake," he says.

I smile, tired, and beckon for him to sit beside me.

"I'm sorry for being late, I just—I just got to walking, and…"

He smells like _soju_ and seawater. He takes the seat and sets his head down onto the table.

"I'm sorry," he says again. "I'm so, so sorry."

The apologies are not for me alone. The boy suddenly begins to cry, the quick, heaving sobs racking his body as he covers his face with his hands. It is the first and last time I will see him weep. I set down the silks and hold him, but he is difficult to embrace. His broad shoulders, still muscled from his fighting years, are like boulders against the wind; his heart betrays him. It yields.

I hold him, imagining I am his mother, and I tell him in my mind how everything will be all right, even as we watch our worlds crumble from the anguish. In my arms he melts, and I rock him back and forth, back and forth, like the ocean miles away crashing on the rocks, as salty as the tears staining my shirt.

_I'm nearly finished with your hanbok._

He looks up as if I had spoken, then gazes at the silks. He reaches for the pile of fabric. He's mentioned red several times, but white fares better with that shocking hair. White and small flashes of gold, green, and black. White suits him so well.

"You're almost done," he murmurs, pulling himself away from me.

_Yes. Almost done, in more ways than this._

I gesture for him to try it on. He drapes the silk over his body, the strong, sinewy arms disappearing beneath _jeogori_ sleeves as white as snow, his red bangs falling over his eyes so I can no longer read his face. I help him finish dressing, adjusting where needed, smoothing a wrinkle, straightening a stray edge, tucking back loose threads. He's too self-conscious around me to try on the _baji_, but the_ jeogori_ is enough. I already know he will wear it beautifully.

"This is amazing," he whispers, fingering the cloth between two fingers. "You're gifted."

I reach for his hair, sweeping it up into _sangtu_, the traditional topknot, and he sighs, the skin of his forehead growing taut.

_Wings indeed, dear child. Your mother was right. _

**-Seoul-**

The third time he saw her she was in an alley behind the restaurant where she worked, the boy cowering behind her legs. Two men advanced towards them, one of them brandishing a switchblade, demanding money and other obscene requests Hwoarang didn't bother to comprehend. All he knew was that he was attacking them without a thought, coming down on the man with the knife with a spine-shattering axe kick. When he turned the girl had already defeated the other man. Her fists and shirt were speckled with blood.

It was too classic, this scene. Too familiar. And yet Hwoarang found himself breathless.

She gathered Huan into her arms and asked the boy if he was all right. He was too big to be held in such a manner, but she pressed him to her chest anyway, smoothing back his hair as he trembled in her embrace.

"_Komap sumnida_," she breathed, her gaze meeting Hwoarang's. "They just came so fast. I could have fought them both, but Huan was here and I—"

"It's okay," he said. "It's over."

"There's been so much crime in the last couple years. I'm thinking I should just take Huan with me and move back to Tianjin."

"Oh, and China's any better? I hear all sorts of stories from your beloved mother country."

He'd always be a loyalist, even if Seoul was the reason for the arrows in his chest.

Ignoring him, she set the boy down and brushed the dirt from his shorts. She was so tender Hwoarang looked away, feigning intrigue with the gravel under his shoes.

"My aunt has food at home. Are you hungry?" she asked.

He felt like a fool when he couldn't answer right away. Besides the absurdity of such a question, he was still trying to understand how she was here, and why, like during every crucial moment in his life, it had occurred in the midst of violence.

"She won't be there when we arrive. Her shift at the office starts about now."

Hwoarang barely listened as he finally noticed the boy's scraped knees and hands, the dried crusts of blood, the bruise beginning to form on the soft cheekbone. He remembered Chung Hee, as young as Huan. As violent as Hwoarang. They should be around ten or eleven-years-old now.

Muddled in these thoughts, he managed a nod, and then followed the woman and the boy out of the alley. It was so crowded, but he knew he could die on this sidewalk, right now, and no one would look his way. They would take cares to step over his cadaver, though, making sure their clothes didn't touch him.

The apartment was one of the newer ones, a housing project that opened up three or four years ago to accommodate Seoul's exponential population growth. A lone ceramic pot of white lilies sat in the shaded entrance. A stray tomcat licked his paws in the bushes, content after a long hunt for the unwary chickadees nesting in the nearby trees; there were many strays nowadays, feline and otherwise. Hwoarang stood there, his chin held high, even as his heart beat too fast and sweat trickled between his shoulder blades. Yes, this was happening: he'd agreed to lunch with strangers wearing blood-spotted clothes, one a thief and the other an aggressive enigma so unlike the swollen sweetness in her mouth. It shouldn't have felt strange, yet he found his fingers fidgeting with the lint in his pockets.

The woman fumbled for her keys. She was still shielding the child with her body, her muscular legs positioned purposefully behind him even though the danger had subsided. Huan darted into the apartment when she opened the door.

"Come in," she said, her hair still mussed from the fight. "Excuse the mess."

"Do you always invite strangers into your home?"

"You saved our lives. This is the least I can do. Besides, Huan still has to make up for robbing you. He's been getting into a lot of trouble lately, and I won't have him think his actions don't have consequences."

So she remembered him then, even though the stolen suitcase episode happened almost two years ago. Huan blushed in his chair as he slapped band-aids onto his knees.

"Who are you, his mother?" the redhead smirked.

"I might as well be. His is always working."

"And yours?"

"Dead."

How disappointing they shared this loss in common. But he would not make it a conversation starter. Instead, Hwoarang felt the familiar anger rising in his chest, and allowed it to choke back the sympathy, to wall up memories better dead.

"It was a long time ago," she said, trying to ease the silence. "She was the typical American: unworldly, thinking she was entitled to everything. She got involved with bad business and, well, they made sure she never revealed company secrets."

Her voice trailed off, tightened, cleared. There. There was the pain disguised in anger and vague explanation. Hwoarang relaxed.

"I thought you were Chinese," he said, deftly changing the topic.

"I am. But Mom was American. Here you go."

She set in front of him a bowl of fresh _dukbokki_, _kimchi_, rice and pork spare ribs. Apparently her aunt was a fantastic cook.

"I'm Xifeng."

He bowed his head in acknowledgement, told her his name, and wolfed down the food. She offered him more, and he was hungrier now, but perhaps it was the ice in her eyes, that slight glint of terror that made him shake his head.

"Is everything all right now?"

"What do you mean?"

"Is Huan forgiven? You won't hurt him?"

And he realized she already knew. _You fool._ He was gripping his chopsticks too tightly. He knew the look of rage that must now hold his face, thick and stubborn as cement. But Xifeng kept her gaze steady. He could tell she'd been in many fights; how else could she remain so calm in front of an enemy? Because that's what he was at this moment, her enemy, sitting in her kitchen, having fallen into her hospitality trap.

He remembered Kwan Youngeun, how he'd reminded her of his power, in a single movement, with a single warning. But now, with this woman and her knowing eyes, he couldn't move.

"They call you the Blood Talon. Right?"

Her fists were clenched, but she restrained them at her sides. _Go on. Hit me._ He wanted her to, so he could see what she was made of. So he could taste her truth. Essence was revealed best in blood.

And what did that make _him_?

"So you have me," he replied, emotionless. "Why don't you call the cops?"

"Because, if one of your people finds out it was me, then Huan isn't safe," she replied, her voice quaking. "Then I'll be as dead as his aunt—as my mother."

"Look, that wasn't my gang doing all those things. I don't do that anymore."

Anymore…

"Why should I believe that when your picture is all over the news? When your own guardian sold you out when the police questioned him?"

"What would you know about Baek Doo San?"

The question came out as a snarl, and Xifeng took a step back.

"I'm surprised he hasn't already hunted me down and turned me in himself. The man's a fucking bloodhound," Hwoarang snapped, poking at the remaining rice grains sticking to his bowl. "I don't deserve anything from him but punishment."

Where once he beat the boy, or hid the motorcycle keys, or changed the locks on all the doors, now Baek had simply given up. He was tired of chasing thunder. Let the law have him, let his fate be decided by men who didn't care.

"What do you want from me?" he asked.

"I could ask you to stop all this violence, but then again—"

_"I didn't do those things!"_

He'd risen from his chair, shoved it so hard against the wall it left a dent. A glimmer of fear flickered across Xifeng's face—right before she punched him in the jaw. Hwoarang reeled backwards, unprepared with a defense for the second time in his life. Blood began to pool in his mouth.

"So she _does _fight. Where'd you learn that, huh? Some Communist handbook?" he spat.

"From my mother," she replied, her fists raised.

He felt the old adrenaline returning, the fury, the hatred he always felt during a street fight. During a war that was supposed to be a game. He was about to say something vile, something that might hurt her more than a kick to that pretty face, but out of the corner of his eye he saw Huan at the foot of the stairs, watching them. In his hands was an acoustic guitar, the wood as dark as blood.

"Just stay the fuck out of my way," Hwoarang seethed, before stalking out the door.

Walking home, he cursed himself for even challenging her, smaller and weaker, unthreatening. He put an ice pack on his jaw, hated how much it hurt. He shouldn't have overreacted, shouldn't have allowed her to see the redness beyond the dye in his hair.

Because he _was _responsible for all of it. He despised her for instinctively knowing this. He despised her for being lovely. But most of all, he hated her for that look in her eyes when Huan became involved.

She had someone to protect. She had someone to fight for.

**-Soul-**

Near midnight Happiness knocks on the door with a guitar case strapped to his back.

"You're a rock star," he squeaks, shrinking beneath my glare. "That's why I stole your suitcase."

"You followed me." The kid was a natural criminal.

"Sorry about Feng. She's actually really nice."

"What are you doing here."

"To play guitar."

"Why the hell would you want to do that? It's fucking late."

"You swear a lot."

"Oh and you're so innocent, aren't ya, stealing people's things."

So I'm arguing with an eleven-year-old. Even if I've forgiven him for the incident I know guilt may be the only thing that gets him off the porch and out of my business.

"Yeah, sorry about that…"

"So scram! Go home."

_Don't be like me. Go home to your mother. Good God, why are you here right now!_

"Please, mister? Mom gave me this, but it's kinda big. I'd like to learn."

Learn? Why would anyone want to learn anything from me?

Sighing, I usher him inside. I can't hate him anymore, even if he has a dragon of a cousin. I remind myself that this is a child now, not Chung Hee, whose something else altogether. The seamstress frowns at me, grins at Huan, and disappears into the kitchen to fix him a snack.

"Okay, Kid. Show me something."

He plucks some mellow mainstream John Mayer chord. I stop him before he destroys my eardrums.

"I meant real music."

"Can you play?"

"Not anymore." That word.

"Come on, I know you can," he urges, pushing the guitar into my hands. "I've heard you before, so don't lie."

"Like hell you've heard me play."

"That wasn't you all those times at night?"

Well, fuck.

The guitar is as red as cherries, as blood. Pluck it from the tree and taste its sweetness. Plunge into it a blade and I know it would bleed. I can smell the wood, like an ocean wind, like victory after hours of sweat. Like a brief daydream under sakura trees.

Cradling the instrument against me, my fingers curl upon the strings, the steel cold and taut—and I play. I play and I make something beautiful. It's a Nirvana song, a nirvana song, for the first time after almost two years.

_Feelin' uninspired,  
Think I'll start a fire…_

I must have forgotten the kid was there, because I close my eyes, like I used to, and let the guitar guide the music into me, through me, out, in, bursting and pulsing in waves behind the darkness in my sight, beneath the dark edges of soul, if there is even a thing as that. If there is then only this music can find it.

_ Think you're kinda neat,  
Then she tells me I'm a creep…_

I remember Ummah and her stories, Baek and his hard love. I remember Sung and his idiot laugh, the gang and their bloody loyalty. I remember Xifeng and that look in her eyes, Huan and his mischievous innocence. I even remember my father. The music possesses me, seizes me, ties me in knots, releases me again.

_Friends don't mean a thing.  
Guess I'll leave it up to me…_

When I finish, Huan is all dimples and white teeth. "I _knew_ you could play," he beams.

Behind him, the seamstress too is smiling, soft and sad and happy at the same time. I feel myself smiling back and instantly regret it. I hand back to Huan the guitar.

"Okay. It's late," I say, my fingers still itching for the instrument. "Don't want old Xifeng to get on your case, now do you?"

"Can you teach me? Please?"

I'm about to say no again until I see the look on his face. I used to look at Baek that way, before I shifted loyalties and shamed him for good. Music could be the one thing that saves the kid from making my mistakes.

I know I can't protect the child. That's one thing I understand that Xifeng will not. But I can give him options, something I thought I never had.

"First, you'll learn how to control it," I begin, shushing him when he tries to interrupt. "Notes, chords, basic songs. You'll need some sheet music. Once you've mastered that…then you can let it speak."

"Guitars can talk?"

"Yes. And if you're really good to them, they can sing, too."

* * *

**Glossary**

_jeogori_ - hanbok upper garment worn by both men and women

_baji_ - traditional hanbok pants

_komap sumnida_ - thank you


End file.
